Firefighters in France have spent the weekend trying to save Bordeaux from an immense conflagration. On Monday morning, the city’s prefecture announced that the situation was ‘broadly stable’, although nine firefighters were injured on Sunday, bringing the total to 84 since the fire began on Wednesday.
More than 42,000 hectares have been lost to the fire and the flames are now nine miles from Bordeaux, France’s ninth biggest city with a population of 270,000. The city’s mayor, Thomas Cazenave, has said there are no plans to evacuate residents, but holidaymakers have been told to stay away.
President Emmanuel Macron will chair a crisis meeting on Monday morning to discuss the fire that began when a contractor was clearing vegetation near power lines 22 miles west of Bordeaux. The authorities were alerted within minutes but the flames were already out of control by the time the first crews arrived. It has now become a ‘pyrocumulonimbus” – a huge fire thunderstorm driven by its own winds and lightning.
France has been subjected to one of the fiercest heatwaves in its history this summer and temperatures in the south-west of the country will peak at 38C on Wednesday.
The fire threatening Bordeaux is one of many to have swept France in recent weeks: from Fontainebleau in the north to Provence in the south and across the Mediterranean on the island of Corsica, more than 70,000 hectares have been scorched in 2026.
This figure surpasses the 66,000 hectares that were lost to flames in the summer of 2022. One of those wildfires was in the Gironde department, close to Bordeaux, and was described at the time as the ‘fire of the century’.
In response, President Emmanul Macron launched in October 2022 an ‘emergency aerial rearmament plan’. At the heart of his €250m proposal was the expansion of the Canadair amphibious aircraft fleet to 16; these are water bomber planes fitted with two 3,000-litre tanks that are filled from a large body of water.
Last summer, it was reported that the President had not made good on his promise which, according to Le Figaro, was always ‘untenable’. The newspaper disclosed that in 2024 Macron’s government slashed its civil protection budget by nearly €53m, which led to the cancellation of an order for two fire-fighting aircraft.
This cost-cutting decision has been seized on by the President’s adversaries this month. Ten days ago in parliament, one of Marine Le Pen’s MPs, Julien Limongi, asked why fire-fighting budgets have been reduced when ‘warnings have been coming one after another for years’. Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise echoed this criticism, telling the government that ‘you can no longer deny your responsibilities’.
Laurent Nuñez, the Minister of the Interior, tried to brush off the accusations by saying they were ‘completely pointless’; the firestorm threatening to engulf Bordeaux would suggest they were not.
It is just not politicians who are pointing an accusatory finger at the government. It was revealed at the weekend that of the 12 Canadair aircraft available to France, only five were operational on Friday and seven on Saturday. The other five are undergoing maintenance due to ‘wear and tear’.
Firefighters of Paris Fire Brigade in Marcheprime, west of Bordeaux, on Sunday (Getty Images)
In disclosing these figures, Éric Durand, a pilot and deputy secretary-general of the National Union of Civil Aviation Flight Crew, said that ‘the situation is no longer sustainable; we must find solutions’.
One of the Canadair pilots, Grégory Prats, went further, saying that the lack of fire-fighting aircraft was ‘scandalous’. The seven aircraft that are operational are on average 30 years old and therefore susceptible to mechanical problems.
The government hasn’t appreciated the criticism
There has also been criticism from fire-fighters on the ground. At the start of this month, Frédéric Monchy of the National Union of Professional Firefighters was asked if promises made by the government in 2022 had been kept. No, he replied, pointing to the ‘shortage of 300 wildfire tanker trucks in the operational fleet’.
On Sunday, another union spokesman claimed that the firefighters’ breathing apparatus was ineffective against the gases and particles they were encountering.
The government hasn’t appreciated the criticism, whether it is in parliament or in the press. ‘Enough of these controversies, enough with the “France-bashing”,’ said Laurent Nuñez last week in Bordeaux. ‘We’re facing this head-on’.
It is the men and women holding the hoses who are facing the crisis head on, and Macron spoke for the nation at the weekend when he saluted their ‘courage and commitment’.
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